Dave's post about the new datum prompted a discussion in our office, and it resulted in the following question:
When sea levels rise due to global warming, will it be considered an act of god or man when it comes to riparian rights?
Background:
Sea levels are rising. Latest measurements put it at around 4.62 mm (0.182 in)/yr for the decade 2013–2022. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise) so if the current rate stays steady every 5.5 years sea level will go up an inch or so. As GPS obtained elevations are based on gravity models and the ellipsoid, they shouldn't change. If it stays that slow, I don't think there will be much turmoil, however assuming some of the more dire models of global warming are correct and we get 1-2± meters of sea level rise in the next 80 years it will prompt an interesting debate when the resulting changes in river and bay water levels are impacting folks. If the sea level rise is "manmade" then in theory it will not change ownership rights, however if it is considered an "act of god" then the property boundaries will change?
Will State Lands Commission demand new and larger leases from all the folks who have docks? Will the public trust shift or will it get reduced if the old boundaries are fixed but the actual water occupies a portion of it? Going to be interesting times :)
I am expecting/hoping that decision will be made by a few courts and then have some laws passed to proactively keep most folks out of litigation.
I expect it will be an interesting litmus test for many folks since the same group that asserts climate change is manmade, is likely the same group that will be most interested in taking away land and associated rights of waterside property owners. Hopefully to build mitigation measures, or just to install a bike path :)
Mikey Mueller, PLS 9076
Sonoma County
Sea Level Rise Question
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hellsangle
- Posts: 680
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- Location: Sonoma, CA
- Contact:
Re: Sea Level Rise Question
Mikey,
I know it is harvest season . . . but you might shut your windows. Me thinks you might be getting some "drift-smoke" from the nearby Sweet Spot dispensary. LOL
Manmade changes might be such things as seawalls/headwalls/sunken ship/etc that alter the "natural" evolution of a watercourse.
(Mikey, shut those windows and stop philosophizing such minutia or your head's gonna explode. LOL At least you're thinking . . . LOL)
Crazy Phil
I know it is harvest season . . . but you might shut your windows. Me thinks you might be getting some "drift-smoke" from the nearby Sweet Spot dispensary. LOL
Manmade changes might be such things as seawalls/headwalls/sunken ship/etc that alter the "natural" evolution of a watercourse.
(Mikey, shut those windows and stop philosophizing such minutia or your head's gonna explode. LOL At least you're thinking . . . LOL)
Crazy Phil
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E_Page
- Posts: 2137
- Joined: Thu Jun 23, 2005 6:49 am
- Location: El Dorado County
Re: Sea Level Rise Question
If you look at the historical trends on the tide station data, some of which go back almost 100 years, you will find that the rate of "rise" has remained pretty constant for that entire time. Along the CA coast, the rates have been between 2 and 7 mm/yr. They don't tend to fluctuate much from year to year but more from station to station. If you do enough research of tide station data, you will find that there are many locations which have shown similar "drops" in sea level over the years. Overall, there has been more sea level "drop" in northern locations and more "rise" between the latitudes of 45 N & S. If you go deeper into it, you will find that many tide stations have been discontinued and that more showing drops have been discontinued than those showing rise.
The State Lands Commission put out a speculative model online to forecast sea level rise at various years over the next century or so (I assume they still have it up). That is a fraudulent scaremongering tool based on the actual verifiable evidence I've seen. Parties behind the sea level rise scare have been telling us for 20ish years that sea level rise will result in catastrophic flooding in just a few years from whenever they make the statement. If you're old enough and were paying attention, you will recall that we were told that there was a consensus of the science in the early 2000s that many of our coastal communities will have been unlivable by 2012, then 2020.
You should expect as many coastal communities to disappear below the rising tides over the next century as you've seen over the last. In other words, no need for panic. Nothing cataclysmic is likely to happen relative to climate change within any of our lifetimes.
I don't deny that the climate is changing. It has done so continually since the beginning of the Earth. Short of complete nuclear holocaust, it is very egotistical for us to believe that anything we as a species have done or will do will have any lasting impact on what the climate does. Like the oceans' tides, climate is cyclical and has such a wide variety of factors that we don't fully understand those cycles. The shortest of these cycles is the day/night cycle. Slightly longer is the annual change of seasons. But we also know and history has tracked decades-long periods of colling and warming. Much greater than any effect we have on the climate are things such as the Sun's surface activity and our planet's tectonic activity.
As to tide data showing "rise" or "drop", the amounts are so small that it isn't really definitive whether it's mostly due to increase or decrease in ice at the poles, regular and constant tectonic activity, or equally both. Again, if you take more than a cursory look at the sea level trends along the CA coast, you will see that the greatest "rise" is shown at stations which are located on islands and lands which are on small peninsula-like formations and that those showing the least "rise" are along areas of more solid land mass.
Back a long time ago, I recall manning the theodolite at a control point near a large puddle that formed on the construction site I was working after a heavy rain. On the other side of the puddle was a large pile of dirt. With lots of heavy equipment moving, the ground was regularly shaking and vibrating as they passed. Between giving line, I was watching the interaction of the puddle and the pile. Every time equipment went by, the edges of the pile would slough of bit by bit into the puddle. A couple of larger clods of dirt had tumbled into the puddle, forming "islands" near the pile. Those islands tended to sink into the puddle just a little faster than the pile. If focusing only on where the pile and the puddle met, one could imagine that the puddle level was rising. In that instance, the interaction of soil and water was due almost entirely to ground movement and depending upon one's focus, could have been perceived as the puddle rising or the dirt falling in. although almost always much slower and due to far different forces, ground movement works the same way on a much larger scale for the continents. Ground surface is ambulatory.
Which brings us to the supposed effect of sea level rise on boundaries. Like Phil said, the man-made effects must be much more direct to fix the ambulatory water boundary in a static location. Set aside that the man-made or human-caused component is speculative, any sea level rise that is occurring is doing so at a rate that cannot be considered anything but slow and imperceptible.
Bring the argument back in that climate change (global warming) is largely human caused. The previous ice ages of several millennia and several dozen millennia ago did not ebb due to man's industrial activities. In fact, during each, there was more mega fauna on the face of the Earth than there were humans. Maybe all that ice melted due to prehistoric bovine flatulance, but I doubt there's much scientific evidence to support that.
As to leases of the beds of navigable waterways from State Lands, there will be no change there either. When it comes to the CSLC having a say in new coastal development, they have added regulations that developers need to consider sea level rise in any design. Why? Because additional regulation increases the State's control and provides them a basis to extract additional conditions. Nevermind that the extent of projected sea level rise is so exaggerated in their models as to be blatantly and demonstrably fraudulent. It is politically popular at this time and they're darn well going to use it.
But, back to leases... The State owns the beds of navigable waters in trust for the public up to the Ordinary High Water Mark. They used to have a policy of analyzing the locations of historic mean high tide lines and leasing areas up to the recorded most landward extent, rationalizing that if the MHTL got up to that point at some point in the past, it likely will again. The courts shot that down because if the MHTL isn't at that location, the State cannot lease lands that the upland owner presently owns (per the statutory ambulatory boundary) back to them. If actual sea level rise having a significant and non-reversing effect were a real thing, why were they going back to previous years and often several decades back to claim to a time when the sea level was much higher?
Using that same legal logic of present ownership, they cannot lease lands that by speculation, they may own sometime in the distant future if the sea levels rise according to their self-serving model. All leases must be periodically updated. the longest leases, IIRC are 49 years and many are much shorter. Sometimes the CSLC requires the lessee to have the area surveyed for a renewal but often not. The idea of requiring each lessee to resurvey their respective sites each time would seem to have a certain regulatory appeal, and would certainly make sense to the true believers in the agency. But it also has a great potential to backfire in that without direct action by the lessee at some point to have altered the shape of the shoreline, most of those surveys would show very little difference from conditions 5, 10 or 49 years prior, thus undercutting the sea level rise scaremongering.
The idea of climate change, and particularly human-caused climate change has become very politicized. Agencies, administrations and legislatures will very often use it as a political weapon. Fortunately, boundary law is relatively free of political considerations. The flip side of that is water boundary cases have among the highest instances of politics creeping in as a consideration is court rulings. I hope it never happens on a level that affects basic boundary principle, but would not be surprised if a politically minded judge or set of justices do so in spite of a lack of empirical evidence and credible science to support such a decision.
The State Lands Commission put out a speculative model online to forecast sea level rise at various years over the next century or so (I assume they still have it up). That is a fraudulent scaremongering tool based on the actual verifiable evidence I've seen. Parties behind the sea level rise scare have been telling us for 20ish years that sea level rise will result in catastrophic flooding in just a few years from whenever they make the statement. If you're old enough and were paying attention, you will recall that we were told that there was a consensus of the science in the early 2000s that many of our coastal communities will have been unlivable by 2012, then 2020.
You should expect as many coastal communities to disappear below the rising tides over the next century as you've seen over the last. In other words, no need for panic. Nothing cataclysmic is likely to happen relative to climate change within any of our lifetimes.
I don't deny that the climate is changing. It has done so continually since the beginning of the Earth. Short of complete nuclear holocaust, it is very egotistical for us to believe that anything we as a species have done or will do will have any lasting impact on what the climate does. Like the oceans' tides, climate is cyclical and has such a wide variety of factors that we don't fully understand those cycles. The shortest of these cycles is the day/night cycle. Slightly longer is the annual change of seasons. But we also know and history has tracked decades-long periods of colling and warming. Much greater than any effect we have on the climate are things such as the Sun's surface activity and our planet's tectonic activity.
As to tide data showing "rise" or "drop", the amounts are so small that it isn't really definitive whether it's mostly due to increase or decrease in ice at the poles, regular and constant tectonic activity, or equally both. Again, if you take more than a cursory look at the sea level trends along the CA coast, you will see that the greatest "rise" is shown at stations which are located on islands and lands which are on small peninsula-like formations and that those showing the least "rise" are along areas of more solid land mass.
Back a long time ago, I recall manning the theodolite at a control point near a large puddle that formed on the construction site I was working after a heavy rain. On the other side of the puddle was a large pile of dirt. With lots of heavy equipment moving, the ground was regularly shaking and vibrating as they passed. Between giving line, I was watching the interaction of the puddle and the pile. Every time equipment went by, the edges of the pile would slough of bit by bit into the puddle. A couple of larger clods of dirt had tumbled into the puddle, forming "islands" near the pile. Those islands tended to sink into the puddle just a little faster than the pile. If focusing only on where the pile and the puddle met, one could imagine that the puddle level was rising. In that instance, the interaction of soil and water was due almost entirely to ground movement and depending upon one's focus, could have been perceived as the puddle rising or the dirt falling in. although almost always much slower and due to far different forces, ground movement works the same way on a much larger scale for the continents. Ground surface is ambulatory.
Which brings us to the supposed effect of sea level rise on boundaries. Like Phil said, the man-made effects must be much more direct to fix the ambulatory water boundary in a static location. Set aside that the man-made or human-caused component is speculative, any sea level rise that is occurring is doing so at a rate that cannot be considered anything but slow and imperceptible.
Bring the argument back in that climate change (global warming) is largely human caused. The previous ice ages of several millennia and several dozen millennia ago did not ebb due to man's industrial activities. In fact, during each, there was more mega fauna on the face of the Earth than there were humans. Maybe all that ice melted due to prehistoric bovine flatulance, but I doubt there's much scientific evidence to support that.
As to leases of the beds of navigable waterways from State Lands, there will be no change there either. When it comes to the CSLC having a say in new coastal development, they have added regulations that developers need to consider sea level rise in any design. Why? Because additional regulation increases the State's control and provides them a basis to extract additional conditions. Nevermind that the extent of projected sea level rise is so exaggerated in their models as to be blatantly and demonstrably fraudulent. It is politically popular at this time and they're darn well going to use it.
But, back to leases... The State owns the beds of navigable waters in trust for the public up to the Ordinary High Water Mark. They used to have a policy of analyzing the locations of historic mean high tide lines and leasing areas up to the recorded most landward extent, rationalizing that if the MHTL got up to that point at some point in the past, it likely will again. The courts shot that down because if the MHTL isn't at that location, the State cannot lease lands that the upland owner presently owns (per the statutory ambulatory boundary) back to them. If actual sea level rise having a significant and non-reversing effect were a real thing, why were they going back to previous years and often several decades back to claim to a time when the sea level was much higher?
Using that same legal logic of present ownership, they cannot lease lands that by speculation, they may own sometime in the distant future if the sea levels rise according to their self-serving model. All leases must be periodically updated. the longest leases, IIRC are 49 years and many are much shorter. Sometimes the CSLC requires the lessee to have the area surveyed for a renewal but often not. The idea of requiring each lessee to resurvey their respective sites each time would seem to have a certain regulatory appeal, and would certainly make sense to the true believers in the agency. But it also has a great potential to backfire in that without direct action by the lessee at some point to have altered the shape of the shoreline, most of those surveys would show very little difference from conditions 5, 10 or 49 years prior, thus undercutting the sea level rise scaremongering.
The idea of climate change, and particularly human-caused climate change has become very politicized. Agencies, administrations and legislatures will very often use it as a political weapon. Fortunately, boundary law is relatively free of political considerations. The flip side of that is water boundary cases have among the highest instances of politics creeping in as a consideration is court rulings. I hope it never happens on a level that affects basic boundary principle, but would not be surprised if a politically minded judge or set of justices do so in spite of a lack of empirical evidence and credible science to support such a decision.
Evan Page, PLS
A Visiting Forum Essayist
A Visiting Forum Essayist
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Mike Mueller
- Posts: 328
- Joined: Mon Nov 26, 2012 6:53 am
Re: Sea Level Rise Question
Evan,
Thank you for taking the time to think through my question. I expect your predictions of how the bureaucracy will handle it are correct, and I am quite interested in the tidal station discontinuation pattern you brought up. Seems like something an investigative reporter should dig through! Or the first clue of a Grisham novel that leads to a nifty story :)
I agree that most of the predictions are like acid rain warnings from the 1980's-1990's that said all the marble of Rome and Greece was going to be dissolved away and all the forests would melt and die. The Skeptical Environmentalist is more credible to me than 98% of the global warming folks. However even Lomborg doesn''t deny things are changing, just how to handle it.
Interesting times :)
Mikey Mueller, PLS 9076
Sonoma County
Thank you for taking the time to think through my question. I expect your predictions of how the bureaucracy will handle it are correct, and I am quite interested in the tidal station discontinuation pattern you brought up. Seems like something an investigative reporter should dig through! Or the first clue of a Grisham novel that leads to a nifty story :)
I had thought that most of the raising tidal stations were primarily due to lithosphere/asthenosphere interactions with crustal rebound from glaciation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_reboundE_Page wrote: Sun Oct 20, 2024 5:58 pm Again, if you take more than a cursory look at the sea level trends along the CA coast, you will see that the greatest "rise" is shown at stations which are located on islands and lands which are on small peninsula-like formations and that those showing the least "rise" are along areas of more solid land mass.
The "natural" cycle is what I assume lead to the "little ice age" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age which(IMO) was prevented by our CO2 production in the industrial revolution. I agree that most folks who espouse global warming based "end of the world" scenarios are generally more of a zealot than a scientist, but there are some pretty clear graphs that are showing interesting trends. (https://www.encyclopedia.com/environmen ... ontroversy) A nifty book that looks into some of the crazier sides of things is "Termination Shock" by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel) Stephenson. Enough of his predictions of the future come true that I give him quite a bit of faith. IE Check out the origins of Google Earth in his book "Snow Crash".E_Page wrote: Sun Oct 20, 2024 5:58 pm Bring the argument back in that climate change (global warming) is largely human caused. The previous ice ages of several millennia and several dozen millennia ago did not ebb due to man's industrial activities. In fact, during each, there was more mega fauna on the face of the Earth than there were humans. Maybe all that ice melted due to prehistoric bovine flatulance, but I doubt there's much scientific evidence to support that.
I agree that most of the predictions are like acid rain warnings from the 1980's-1990's that said all the marble of Rome and Greece was going to be dissolved away and all the forests would melt and die. The Skeptical Environmentalist is more credible to me than 98% of the global warming folks. However even Lomborg doesn''t deny things are changing, just how to handle it.
Interesting times :)
Mikey Mueller, PLS 9076
Sonoma County
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pls5528
- Posts: 230
- Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2007 5:42 pm
Re: Sea Level Rise Question
Perhaps we should consult with the "Venetians", who have dealt with this issue for well over a thousand years? I am one who thinks "everything is cyclic". With that, yes with more people and fossil fuels has an effect on the global temperatures, my thought is that we are headed toward an age of warmer climate. After that, we perhaps will move back to an "ice age" once again. The north star won't be the north star forever? With the knowledge that we know (from our short little glimpse of time on this earth), we can plan for it. Venice is still there, they dealt with it and we can deal with it too.